I was and still am very much in favor of the ideas and concepts, but when I actually tried to use it my opinion on it turned by 180°:
- The syntax is awful - No dynamic libraries - Slow compile times - Many checks are too stupid to figure out some valid cases (maybe that improved meanwhile)
- No dynamic libraries
This is technically incorrect, but practically correct, by the way.
> (maybe that improved meanwhile)
The next version, released on December 6th, ships "non-lexical lifetimes", which does make the borrow checker smarter.
While I understand that some people prefer this, I prefer static linking to dynamic linking. So much in fact that I refuse to use environments that only do dynamic linking in any of my projects.
Yes, I have to make a few concessions to that because of the idiocy of glibc, but other than that.
I generally do not mind syntax. I like OCaml’s and Erlang’s, for example, which are usually considered ugly, but for some reason I can’t enjoy the look of Rust code. I think all the nested <<<>>> and the use of :: are a large part of this.
But the real issue for me was refactoring owned struct fields into borrowed ones. The ‘a lifetimes leak everywhere; you have to add them to the struct field, after its “impls”, and everywhere the struct name appears.
I’ve found that Pony provides the same level of safety in a much more lightweight manner with its capabilities system. Interestingly, if I’m not mistaken, early Rust was somewhat similar to Pony.
Unfortunately Pony doesn’t have the same development resources and thus the ecosystem is somewhat lacking.
I wish D would have won the C++-successor race.